OBIEE, OBI Apps, ODI, Informatica, Essbase, BI Publisher...you name it. The OBI suite entails them all and more.
I will talk mainly about its technical aspects, interesting findings and noteworthy solutions, but will definitely throw in some random weirdness.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The ominous patch 8293083

Greetings, programs!

Back on April 3rd, when I initially wanted to get patch #8293083, I hit a wall.

The patch had been made obsolete over night. So I raised an SR with Oracle. First response on the 14th:

"Bug 8293083 is a duplicate of Bug 8332167.

Bug 8332167 is fixed in 10.1.3.4.410Also in patch for Linux ARU 11105211No patch for Windows."

Sweet. So because it was a duplicate of a Linux patch the Windows patch was made obsolete? My mind boggles trying to understand that logic, but anyways I insisted on getting the patch and voilà! The patch exists again for Windows since the 17th.

Sounds good? No, not really.

8293083 is actually QF420 and in order to install it, you need to replace your whole OracleBI\server\bin folder. In itself, not an issue, but there's also patch 8290868 (QF410), which is a patch for 7482937 which resolves a rather serious issue for MDX generation for and/or filters.

The issue being that 8290868 - like 8293083 - replaces the whole bin folder. And Oracle still can't confirm that 8293083 is an incremental patch and includes all of 8290868.

So right now there's a choice.a) Use 8293083, but not be sure that 8290868 and 7482937 function correctly

or

b) Use 8290868and 7482937 and wait for a final statement from Oracle.

I've gone for b) since it's extremely difficult to track down each and every weird behaviour in the MDX generation for all filters, EVALUATE statements, unions etc etc.

Of course I will keep you guys updated with my latest findings and Oracles statements.